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Saving energy with appliance computing

DecTOP
Most, if not all, of the Thayer-based readers of this blog will have used one of the print release stations spread through our building. Each release station requires a computer to run the release software on. The computers at the release stations are not new, but still quite beefy (and power hungry at ~70 watts) for the job they have to do.

Enter the DecTOP. The DecTOP is relatively old technology, designed by AMD years ago, with a 366 MHz AMD [snip...]

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Posted 17 February 2008 § Energy ‡ Comments (0) °

Saving Energy in the Computer Labs - Part II

When I left you in my last post on saving energy in the computer labs, I had four machines suspending in the M210 computer lab. There were mixed results during the test run. The older, Dell Dimension 4600 computers went to sleep and woke back up without a problem, however the newer Dell Optiplex 745 computers failed to come out of suspend approximately 30% of the time. Try as I might, updating drivers and playing with BIOS and power settings, I was unable to [snip...]

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Posted 08 November 2007 § Computer Labs § Energy § Windows ‡ Comments (0) °

Saving Energy in the Computer Labs

Ever wonder how much power an average idle computer takes to run? A newer Dell Optiplex 745 with a 22″ LCD monitor, such as those in M210, consume 110 Watts just sitting there, not logged in with the screen saver on. When the monitor goes into power save mode, the consumption goes down to 70 Watts. When the computer itself goes into standby mode, power consumption plummets to just 2 Watts. Since most of the ~65 Thayer lab computers are idle most of the time, [snip...]

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Posted 02 November 2007 § Computer Labs § News and Announcements ‡ Comments (1) °

Public printing changes

The Computing Services team has made a few changes that we hope will improve the printing services provided at Thayer School:

  • In “room” 201 (the balcony overlooking the great hall), we have added a dedicated transparency printer, 201-color-trans. This means that there are now two dedicated, high speed color printers in 201: 201-color-paper and 201-2-color-paper.
  • We have put a color printer in room M210 named m210-color. Both m210-color and m210 now use a print release station (located next to the printers) to release print jobs as required.

Please [snip...]

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Posted 14 August 2007 § News and Announcements § Printing ‡ Comments (0) °

Backup Program Chosen: AMANDA

After performance and feature testing AMANDA and Bacula, we’ve decided to go with AMANDA. The speed that AMANDA was able to backup data over the network was nearly twice that of Bacula (80 MB/s compared to 40 MB/s), and AMANDA was slightly faster pushing data to tape (77 MB/s compared to 63 MB/s). The speed advantages that AMANDA showed within our topology were significant enough to warrant it as our backup program of choice. That being said, within other topologies and with different needs, I [snip...]

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Posted 28 May 2007 § Backups § File Storage ‡ Comments (2) °